The Green Revolution

by Ralph McInerny

  “I didn’t do it, Father,” Wintheiser said when, having stooped to avoid hitting his head, he came into the visiting room where Father Carmody awaited him. Then he realized the priest was not alone.

  “Have you met Roger Knight, George?”

  “I have.” The two men shook hands, contrasting specimens of the species. George could have been the model for Michelangelo’s David, whereas Roger … Well, there was a lot to Roger, but it wasn’t distributed in a way that would interest a sculptor. Both men had difficulty getting comfortable on the chairs in the visiting room.

  “I didn’t do it, Father.”

  Father Carmody looked him in the eye. “I know that. The problem is that we have to prove it. It is said a negative cannot be proved. If that were so, the whole criminal court system is reared on a fallacy. Where were you when whatever happened to Iggie happened?”

  “Early last Sunday morning? I went to six o’clock Mass in the lower basilica.”

  “Six!” Even the old priest was surprised.

  Wintheiser turned to Roger. “Do you know Greg Walsh, in the university archives?”

  “Know him? He’s a friend of mine.”

  “He’s become a friend of mine. Not everyone you run into knows much about the ancient languages of the Middle East. In my spare moments, I’ve been visiting the archives. Stolen moments. Greg offered to let me in early Sunday. That would give me hours before I had to go on television.”

  “And you spent those hours in the archives in the library.”

  “From about seven until eleven thirty.”

  “And before all that? Before the six o’clock Mass.”

  “My motel. I went to bed fairly early, well, before midnight. I asked to be called at five fifteen.”

  “Have you told the police this?” Roger asked.

  “They’re checking it out.”

  “Trying to disprove an affirmative?”

  Wake-up calls at the motel, it turned out, were computerized. When a guest asked to be called at a particular time, it was entered along with the room number, and at that time the phone in the room in question rang. After seven rings, the phone shut itself off, but if no one in the room responded to the first call, another was made ten minutes later. The difficulty lay in the fact that there was no record of that second call having been answered or not.

  “There was a second call?”

  “I never heard the first.”

  “Can anyone confirm all this?”

  George glanced at Roger, then leaned toward Father Carmody. “Pearl.”

  “Pearl!”

  “We’re still married, Father.”

  Father Carmody lifted his hands as if to forestall any details on the marital state. Pearl, George’s estranged wife, had shown up unannounced and called him from the lobby, and he told her to come on up.

  “The place was full. She would have had to sleep in the lobby.”

  “What time did she arrive?”

  “Everyone asks me that. I didn’t even turn on the light. I propped the door open and got back into bed.”

  “And Pearl came up?”

  “Yes.”

  Again they were on the edge of matters as mysterious and unintelligible to Roger as to the old celibate. The thought that occurred to Father Carmody he did not voice until he and Roger were headed back to campus.

  “Pearl had as much motive to put an end to Iggie Willis as George. And think of it, she was here.”

  Roger hummed for a moment. “What size shoe does she wear?”

  10

  Guido Senzamacula peeked around his half-opened door and, seeing Lipschutz, tried to close it again, but his colleague’s shoe seemed a practiced door stopper.

  “Guido, we must talk.”

  “No! You are a traitor. I did not sign your statement.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  Silence on the other side of the door; then Guido peeked out at him again. “You admit that?”

  “I admit that.”

  The door swung open. Although it was midafternoon, Guido wore pajamas. There were little drying puffs of shaving cream beneath his earlobes.

  “You must write that down. You must promise to explain it to my son.”

  His son! Lipschutz managed not to shiver. A bonus of what he was about would be the comeuppance of that young thug. “Yes, yes. Anything you wish. Do I smell coffee?”

  “I am not an authority on your sense data.” A great smile broke out on Guido’s face. It was the first thing he had said in character for longer than he cared to think.

  “That’s true.”

  Lipschutz followed Guido into the kitchen, where indeed there was coffee. Reheated coffee, as it happened. Yesterday’s coffee. Perhaps worse. They sat at the kitchen table.

  “With the nonsense of the petition out of the way, we can turn our minds to important things. Let them play football, Guido, I don’t care. Let them play football all year long, it is all right with Horst Lipschutz. But the work of the university, its true work, must go on, and that, Guido, is up to us.”

  “Then God help the university.”

  “Help will be needed. Yes. Very large sums if my calculations are correct, but with you as the proposed director of the center…”

  “Me! What are you talking about?”

  Lipschutz adopted a knowing look. “Guido, like it or not, we live in a football culture. We must take that into account. You mentioned your son.”

  “Piero?”

  “Piero. A young man who is well known because of his work broadcasting Notre Dame football games.”

  “He is a good boy.”

  “With many contacts, I’m sure.”

  “You mean benefactors?”

  No need to spell everything out now. “This is very interesting coffee.”

  “Do you find it too hot?”

  Not hot enough. But could anything conceal the taste?

  * * *

  Il faut d’abord durer. The maxim was almost Darwinian. First, one must survive—and Lipschutz was a survivor. The traumatic events of recent days had been put into perspective. When he awoke from his fifteen hours of drug-induced sleep in Holy Cross House, he had risen like the son of the widow of Naim to a new life. Past mistakes must be acknowledged, but not brooded over. They were important only insofar as they suggested future action. Lipschutz had been gracious to Father Carmody, grateful for his hospitality, no allusion whatsoever to the contretemps on the steps of the Main Building. Don’t get mad, get even. Withdraw and regroup.

  Roger was gone; Lipschutz said he would walk to campus. He went down the path to the lake. A first ice had formed, hardly thick enough to warrant taking a shortcut across the lake. He imagined himself in a scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliza escaping, leaping from ice floe to ice floe. That such a book should have hastened a country into civil war seemed a testimonial to the power of ideas and imagination, even defective ones.

  The Center for Advanced Studies would be built—perhaps there was still some virgin littoral stretch and the building he envisaged could be nestled somewhere along this lake or the other—but there were to be modifications in the plan. Was it his realization that the Father Carmody who had publicly humiliated him had no known position in the administration, yet was a powerful man? An authority next to which titular authority paled to insignificance? Lipschutz had a moment of candor, of self-knowledge. “I am not well liked,” Lipschutz told himself. “I am not liked at all. At best I am admired, but even that is grudging. There are some, I am told, who find me a comic character. Horst Lipschutz, a comic character! That is indeed comic.” There was no need for him to endorse these judgments of himself, but he could not ignore them, no matter the unfavorable light it cast on those who made them. The center needed a front man, a likable man, a man everyone felt comfortable with. So he had gone to knock on Guido Senzamacula’s door, running the risk of encountering that maniac of a son who had nearly shaken the life out of him. Guido had that spontaneous emotional
nature, gushing forth whatever came to mind, irresistible, and to that Italian, that Mediterranean, charm, Guido had added the patina of smoothness derived from the French. The world could be divided into those who wish they were Italian and those who wish they were French. The twain had met in Guido. He would be a perfect figurehead.

  Some hours later, after a few phone calls, Lipschutz was on his way to the Morris Inn to have a drink with the reputedly filthy rich Mimi O’Toole.

  11

  In the next room, Roger and Father Carmody were talking just loudly enough to make it difficult for Phil to follow the nonsense he was hearing on ESPN. With George Wintheiser out of the picture, it was open season on the Irish and no defenders on the scene except Professor Rimini, bald as an egg, a kind of six-cylinder Dick Vitale. He was better than nothing, but what isn’t?

  “Ty was bounced for doing better than this,” the ineffable Kornheiser cried. “Where’s the fairness, where’s the equity?”

  Who put that idiot in charge of the universe? And NBC had brought back the smug Olbermann on Sunday nights, another know-it-all, and a Clinton shill besides. What next, Dan Rather at the Daytona 500? Maybe there was a conspiracy. Could Charlie Weis be a mole of the forces of evil?

  Phil pressed the mute button and put back his head. The voices from the next room were almost soothing.

  “Work out the time line, Roger. She shows up at his motel when?”

  “It’s pretty vague.”

  “It’s precise enough to make one wonder what she was doing up till then.”

  “I suppose the police could establish that.”

  “Roger, she left home a week ago. Where has she been? What has she been doing?”

  Phil rolled out of his beanbag chair and joined them. “And if anyone had a reason to bonk Iggie Willis, she did.”

  A woman used and cast aside, a woman spurned. A woman who had turned from the Hyperion George to the satyr Iggie. A woman who had tapped on George’s door in the wee hours of last Sunday morning and been admitted on the basis of vows that last a lifetime.

  “Before the reconciliation, she had to clear the decks.”

  “Slay the satyr.”

  “No more reminder of her infidelity.”

  “Phil,” Roger cried. “You’ve become a poet.”

  Father Carmody was not to be dissuaded. Did he really think that the death of Iggie could be traced to Pearl? It didn’t matter whether he thought that or not. What one needed was something Cholis the magnificent could use to sow doubt in the minds of twelve good men and true.

  “That’s a relief,” Roger said. “You can’t expect them to take action against Pearl Wintheiser.”

  “I couldn’t imagine them accusing George,” the old priest said, almost petulantly.

  12

  Death camp commandants have wept while listening to Mozart; serial killers are described by the neighbors as good and thoughtful boys. The inner is not the outer; human beings are mysterious mixtures of good and bad.

  Having thought such thoughts in solitude, Roger voiced them to Greg Walsh. The associate archivist nodded. The subject was George Wintheiser, who was being held in connection with the death of Iggie Willis. It was the fact that Iggie had an affair with Pearl, George’s wife, that sustained the accusation. Roger remembered the way in which the huge former football player had plied Iggie with drink at their party after the game. The fact that Iggie had reeled from their apartment in the wee hours of the morning and staggered across campus to, of all places, Rockne Memorial, there to be attacked, made Roger feel almost responsible for the dentist’s tragic end.

  “George came to the archives often?”

  “Well, he had been here before. On football weekends.”

  Could a man whose doctorate was in Middle Eastern languages with a concentration in Hittite kill his wife’s former lover?

  Could a mass murderer love Mozart?

  On the face of it, the questions were silly, but it is the silly questions we pursue most doggedly.

  “He was here in the archives the Sunday morning after the Boston College game?”

  Greg Walsh, no more than Roger, measured time according to the schedule of the football team, but he understood.

  “Yes, he was here. The monitor let him in so he could take the elevator up here.”

  The two men were talking in the archives on the sixth floor of the Hesburgh Library, in Greg’s office.

  “Of course. The library opens late on Sundays.”

  Still, an early Sunday morning visit to the archives, like knowledge of Hittite, did not rule George Wintheiser out as Iggie Willis’s assailant.

  “What did he come here to see? Have you anything of interest to a man with his scholarly specialty?”

  “Oh, he wanted to look at old issues of the Scholastic.”

  “He did?” That the cultivated former football player should have arisen at dawn one Sunday morning in order to go to an early Mass and then come on to the archives to pore over old issues of what had once been the chief student publication was a disappointment. “You’ll have a record of what he wanted to look at?”

  “Of course.”

  Greg consulted his records, and soon the relevant bound volumes of the Scholastic were on the table before them. Roger would not presume on their friendship and ask Greg to engage in the doubtless absurd effort of going through those volumes. Soon he was alone in the room, slowly turning the glossy pages of issues that dated back to George Wintheiser’s student days.

  Apart from articles devoted to sports, George did not appear in the issues that Roger went through, page by page, trying not to think of Sisyphus rolling a huge rock up a mountain. Ignatius Willis, by contrast, popped up again and again, an officer of his class from sophomore year on, chairman of dance committees, apparently stellar student as well. President of the French Club. Roger leaned over the page to study a photograph. Professor Guido Senzamacula smiled back at him from decades ago, flanked by his star students. The student on his right, Ignatius Willis, was only a head taller than the professor, but the boy on his left, runner-up for the medal Senzamacula was about to present, towered over him. George Wintheiser.

  * * *

  Guido Senzamacula was delighted to see Roger but surprised at the reason for his visit.

  “Is the Chateaubriand Medal still awarded by your department?”

  Guido threw up his hands. “The Chateubriand Medal! I had forgotten all about that. Will you have some wine?”

  “No, no thanks.”

  “Espresso, then?”

  Espresso would be fine. When Guido returned with a tray on which were two diminutive cups and a large bowl of sugar, Roger was settled on the middle cushion of the couch. Guido was shaking his head. “The Chateaubriand Medal.”

  “The medal once won by Ignatius Willis.”

  Having seated himself and sipped his coffee, Guido sighed. “The last recipient.”

  “The last!”

  “It is a painful story.”

  Wherever there are contests, there is the temptation to win by any means. Wherever there are rankings, there is the danger of misapplying criteria for base motives. Wherever there are prizes and medals, it is they rather than the performance they are meant to certify that is sought. Ignatius Willis had been awarded the Chateaubriand Medal on the basis of a plagiarized essay. That it was plagiarized was brought to the knowledge of the committee by an anonymous note. Guido alone of the committee members thought even an anonymous accusation should be disposed of. It was he who learned that the accusation was just.

  “The medal was revoked?”

  “Oh, no. I was outvoted. It would have been too great a scandal.”

  It was an almost pleasant thought that once a plagiarized paper on Chateaubriand’s visit to President Washington in Philadelphia could loom so large as a threat to the reputation of a school.

  “Father Carmody was very persuasive. I very nearly changed my own vote after listening to him.”

  “Georg
e Wintheiser should have won the medal?”

  “The next boy, yes, the runner-up. He had been my choice.” Guido smiled. “I was outvoted so often in those days.”

  “Do you remember Wintheiser’s topic?”

  Guido put back his head and closed his eyes, humming as if to give his memory the proper pitch. His head snapped down. “Peguy’s long poem on Chartres.”

  “By a football player!”

  “Oh, he was a brilliant student, no doubt of that.”

  “Did he know he had been cheated out of the medal?”

  “Good heavens, no. Only the committee knew. The one thing we agreed on was that the medal had been tainted. We decided not to award it again.”

  “But Ignatius Willis knew you knew.”

  “I confronted him, Roger.”

  “And?”

  Guido waved his hand, dismissing the topic. “It was all a long time ago.”

  * * *

  Father Carmody was reluctant to discuss the matter of the Chateaubriand Medal.

  “Anicent history, Roger. Ancient history.”

  “I have spoken to Professor Senzamacula.”

  “Wonderful man. A man of great integrity.”

  “He was outvoted on the matter of revoking the medal.”

  “That was my doing.” Father Carmody puffed thoughtfully on his cigarette. “Ah, the sins of one’s past life.”

  “You regret persuading the committee to keep the plagiarism quiet?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “You half regret it?”

  “The idiot who won the medal by cheating was confronted by Senzamacula.”